121–130 of 195 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
some famous hobbyists that went on to form companis around their hobby: Ford, Edison, etc
The list of hobbyists who didn't go on to form companies around their hobby is orders of magnitude longer than the list of those who did. So it really isn't that useful as a metric.
It comes down to whether or not the people doing the recruiting all have the same subjective opinion.
I screened and interviewed a lot of developers in my last position and it stood out to me that résumé quality seemed to be inversely correlated with the candidate's actual ability. I distinctly remember the absolute best developers that I hired also had the most atrociously bad résumés. The candidates with résumés that literally almost knocked me off my chair failed miserably at the most basic programming task.
Frankly I cannot see an expert in anything other than marketing sitting down and crafting their resume. "Appearance starts where performance ends." Let me illustrate: Growth Engineer One line Resume: "I was employee 7 at Snapchat when we had 6 engineers and 400,000 users. During my tenure as the only growth engineer, our userbase grew to 10 million users over the next 6 months." SEO resume: "I joined XYZ when it was…
This is really not the case.
I've found that some people's greatest accomplishments are trade secrets that they can't show you. Some people's greatest accomplishments are in hobbies you don't quite understand. Some people are good at things even though they don't have a heroic narrative of great accomplishments building up to their job application.
Meanwhile, people who come in to an interview boasting "Look at this! I did this!" are often just taking credit for what their co-workers did.
When people abandoned resumes like this it's because there is some corruption in their hiring process and lesser skilled management is attempting to hire down for political control. Their only goal is to go through the motions and stay employed. Some people don't want experts. They want to have the illusion of a functioning business unit. People with no formal training that have projects that sound impressive to the…
In my observation, most software companies are not technology/engineering companies in the sense you've used above. They have an application that provides value to an industry, or to a group of civilians, but which didn't require any particularly deep insights into new algorithms or into low-level code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of "difficult-to-work-with" questions do you ask? I'd like to filter out these people but I'm not sure what sorts of questions to ask to suss that out.
Basically I goad them into complaining about past bad work experiences and then pay close attention for subtle clues that may indicate that they are systemically disrespectful or unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for. Were they bothered by people, situations or outcomes? Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and you had to go through w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically I goad them into complaining about past bad work experiences and then pay close attention for subtle clues that may indicate that they are systemically disrespectful or unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for. Were they bothered by people, situations or outcomes? Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and you had to go through w…
> unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for It's quite possible the interviewee thinks the item is worth fighting, but you don't because of different principles/axioms. Are you looking for a justification in this case?
On the negative side, you might have someone complaining at length about a bikeshed issue (see http://blue.bikeshed.com/), or complaining about processes they had to follow that sound reasonable to you (for instance, "one change per commit", or "don't break the build"). Or someone complaining bitterly that they don't get to use technologies invented five minutes ago.
It's a lot easier to get information about what people stand for and care about by finding out what they fight against.
When people abandoned resumes like this it's because there is some corruption in their hiring process and lesser skilled management is attempting to hire down for political control. Their only goal is to go through the motions and stay employed. Some people don't want experts. They want to have the illusion of a functioning business unit. People with no formal training that have projects that sound impressive to the…
Management is the problem! Why doesn't management recognize me? I worked hard for my degree and I deserve the rewards. Fuck the fucking people that 'live for this shit'.
Where's their degree? I am trained in . I'm qualified. I deserve the job.
The writer claims to "rely heavily on data," but the punchline of the article is purely anecdotal that 1 person at 1 company got hired, was good and would have been overlooked. I am sure there were also many candidates with good resumes who were now overlooked. This article starts out with an air of science and ends with a completely unproven conclusion. While I do agree in my gut that resumes are not an amazing filt…
Shortly after she says she's come to "rely heavily on data", she says "This post, however, is going to be a bit of a departure. Rather than making broad, sweeping conclusions based on a lot of data points, I’m going to narrow in on one story that happened". I think she did a great job of doing exactly what she set out to do, and since this is just one anecdote, any qualitative or numerical data she presents won't be…
I'd still love to know why the company didn't switch to this full throttle.